Murray-Rossi Senate Race: "No-One Knows How Many Ballots Are Left"

The election was two days ago but no one is quite sure how many ballots are left to be counted in the Washington senate race.
…But democrats are confident they will win.CNN reported this AM that an estimated 74% of votes have been counted.

Patty Murray leads Dino Rossi by just over 14,000 out of more than 1.43 million counted so far.

The Republican’s campaign says it’s optimistic late votes will help Rossi overtake the three-incumbent, but Democrats also like their chances. They point to the big margins Murray is racking up in King County.

So, just how many votes are left to count? That’s where things get tricky.

“No one knows how many ballots are left to count, since large volumes are in the mail and final return rate isn’t knowable,” Dave Ammons, spokesman for Secretary of State Sam Reed, said in an e-mail to seattlepi.com. “Both sides have legitimate theories for a path to victory, but it’s far too close to see how the offsetting trends play out. In my view, this is one of those classic too-close-to-call races. We need to let the vote tally continue.”

Exact numbers are tricky to come by, but we’ll take a stab. Prior to the election, the secretary of state estimated that about 60 percent of the total vote would be tallied Nov. 2. That would leave at least about 572,000 ballots remaining – possibly many more. King County officials say there could be about 350,000 votes still to count from the state’s largest county, which Murray was winning by more than a 60 percent margin.

Where can Rossi pick up votes? Places like Spokane and Clark County, which were favoring the Republican. In Spokane, there are about 100,000 ballots left to count, officials estimate. Rossi was winning 56 percent of the votes there. There also appeared to be about 100,000 votes left to county in Clark County, where Rossi was winning 54 percent of the vote.

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